The 4 Reasons Amazon Is Dead Serious About Its Drone Delivery Service

This undated image
provided by Amazon.com shows the so-called Prime Air unmanned
aircraft project that Amazon is working on in its research and
development labs.AP/Amazon

Despite skepticism from critics saying Amazon's proposed
delivery-by-drone service is an impractical distraction, the
company is totally earnest about one day delivering orders by way
of the flying robots it showed off on CBS's "60 Minutes" last
year, according to Colin Lewis at RobotEnomics.

In the company's drone delivery demo video — which was filmed in another country, likely in order to
influence policy change surrounding commercial drone use in the
United States — Amazon demonstrates a hypothetical future in
which any item available through its Prime Air service can be
delivered to your house in less than 30 minutes. And that's
exactly the future Amazon's aiming at for four big reasons,
writes Lewis:

Instant gratification. It normally takes
two or three days for an order to arrive with a standard Amazon
Prime subscription, but customers could now have the delight of
seeing an order land at their doorstep in a measure
of minutes. (It also increases the temptation to
buy something purely for the sake of seeing a delivery drone in
the flesh.)

Staying ahead of the curve with innovative delivery and
order fulfillment. Amazon's business is dependent
on quality delivery. If drone use enables them to make more of
these in an economically sensible way, than they'll obviously
investigate it quite fully.

Cost of transportation. Amazon spent over $6.5
billion on shipping in 2013 and has lost a total of $8.8 billion
on shipping in the last three years combined.
RobotEnomics has already done the math, but the short answer
is that human-piloted drones working at maximum efficiency for
most of the day will of course reap the company huge savings.
It's also quite easy to imagine someone paying a high premium for
near-instant delivery of a needed item, helping offset the costs
even more.